As is known in the art, a variety of medicine pill bottles and/or containers exist, which house medicine in the form of pills, tablets or liquids. Typically, the medicine bottle top or “cap” is plain with no markings and is often “child-proof” in the sense that the user must “push down” or “squeeze” and turn the medicine bottle cap in a certain way to unlock or open the cap to allow dispensing of the contained medicine contents. These types of standard medicine bottle pill caps typically do not contain any helpful medical dispensing information.
As known in the pharmaceutical and medical industry, one of the greatest dangers in dispensing medicine in medicine pill bottles are the hazards of inconsistent or incorrect labeling which leads to potential health dangers of users taking wrong medication or wrong doses etc. . . . .
There have been recent attempts to provide medicine pill bottles that have been redesigned to provide more medicine information on the bottle than previous iterations. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,980,391 and U.S. Patent Publication No. 2006/0163103 both issued to Deborah Adler et. al., discloses a medicine pharmacy bottle which aims to provide a medicine bottle that can contain, among other things, additional medical information. This attempt has resulted in a bulky hard to store and handle medicine bottle as well as increasing the costs of manufacturing by requiring a specially made bottle rather than utilizing a standard prescription pill bottle.
Other attempts have been made to provide for a medicine pill bottle cap that can provide medical information to a patient in addition to what information is normally contained on the medicine pill bottle container. For example, U.S. Patent Publication No. 2010/0270257A1 (Wachman et. al.) discloses a medicine bottle with electronic embedded curved display. However, the dial cap of this invention requires the need for electronic circuitry which adds both to the costs of manufacturer and the complexity of use for the average user.
Currently, there is not a dial cap system that provides a user with important medical timing and/or quantity dispensing information in a cost effective manner. Thus the need for a dial cap system that meets these needs has been long felt in the industry. Prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions to overcome all of the limitations described above, and thus, solutions to overcome these limitations have long eluded those skilled in the art.